Family watches helplessly as plane crashes

What was meant to be a friendly hello from the skies turned tragic Monday when an F-16C fighter plane crashed just north of Tulia, killing the pilot.

Steve Simons of Fort Worth was scheduled to fly over the Tulia area and had phoned his father-in-law, Cletus Dobbs, to say he would be in the area around 6 p.m.

Simons was a pilot for Delta Airlines and was flying the plane as a member of the Naval Reserves, according to a friend of the family, Dara Rosseau of Tulia.

Neighbors of Dobbs went out to see Simons do a fly-over around 6 p.m. when something went wrong and the plane nose-dived into a field on the Dobb's family farm.

"We went down the road a little ways from our home to see if we could see him," said Wylie Byrd, a friend of the family and operator of the Roll-A-Cone business nearby.

"He started over and we saw him crash there in the field," she said.

"You just can't imagine how quick it happened. You just didn't have time to think," Byrd said.

Neighbors from all around who witnessed the crash drove to the site, and within 15 minutes the emergency vehicles began arriving, she said.

The debris flew about a quarter of a mile from the crash scene, Byrd estimated. She said the crash happened at the corner of Farm-to-Market 146 and Roll-A-Cone Road, about 4 miles north of Tulia.

"When he hit the ground in the field ... there's not any pieces of plane that you can identify left," Byrd said.

She described the crash as a big ball of fire with lots of smoke.

Flying debris set some fires as far as a quarter of a mile away, next to Dobbs' home.

"It happened real quick," Byrd said. "We were a mile from where he was flying over. We don't know what happened. It just looked like it nose-dived."

Simons was a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. He also was a distinguished graduate of the undergraduate pilot training at Reese Air Force Base and flew F-15s at Bitburg, Germany, according to Globe-News files.

Simons married Melba Dobbs of Tulia and they have two daughters, ages 10 and 13, according to Rosseau.